Unlike Any Other

Earl East and his trucks will work on anything Photo: by Adelyn Baber/Adelyn Photography

Things are different at Elite Sales and Service in Benson, Arizona. The service trucks don’t look like conventional service trucks and the company’s owner avoids hiring “technicians."

The company services heavy equipment, from Ditch Witch walk-behind trenchers to 631 Caterpillar scrapers, and commercial fleet vehicles from Ford F-250s to Class 8 trucks. Company owner and manager Earl East explains his unconventional hiring strategies.

“I want mechanics, not technicians,” he says. “I’m not interested in somebody who is a whiz with a laptop. I want a guy who can walk up to a machine and figure out a hydraulic system by looking at it. The strength of our company is that we’ll work on anything. We can do that because I have some of the best mechanics in the region, guys who actually fix things rather than just replace parts.”

East’s father, Ellis, founded Elite Sales and Service in 1995. The younger East took the reins five years ago and has steadily expanded the business, adding custom-built service trucks based on a unique design developed by his father.

Elite Sales and Services has a fleet of several service trucks Photo: Adelyn Baber/Adelyn Photography

The company’s current service trucks range from Dodge Ram 3500s to several full-size Peterbilt and Kenworth-based Class 8 rigs. All feature custom-built flatbeds outfitted for field repairs. A Cormach, Palfinger or Hiab knuckleboom crane mounts at the front of the bed behind the cab on the larger service trucks.

“Knucklebooms are more versatile than cable cranes,” East says. “(For example) my guys can

use their crane to pull apart a big hydraulic cylinder. You can use knuckleboom to push or pull things, not just lift.”

A Maxim folding hydraulic-lift tailgate is at the rear of each flatbed. Versatility is again the goal.

“You can lower the liftgate down to the ground, or knee-height, or whatever height you need so you can get all your weight on the drill if you’re drilling something in the vise we have mounted on the liftgate,” he says. “Or maybe you use a transmission jack to pull a big transmission. Instead of having to rig the crane to load that transmission, we just roll the jack and transmission onto the liftgate. The same goes for loading and unloading tires and rims.”

East mounts custom-built storage boxes under each side of the flatbed, ahead of the rear dual wheels. The seven-foot long, 24-inch by 24-inch boxes with two interior full-length shelves help him meet his prime directive for his service trucks:

“I want to be able to reach everything from the ground,” he says. “All the extra parts we carry, all the tools, all the controls for the welder and other stuff are mounted so we don’t have to climb up onto the bed.”

Hidden behind the under-bed storage compartments are custom-made air and fluid tanks. Eight-

inch by seven-foot-long cylindrical tanks mounted alongside the frame rails under the bed each hold nearly 20 gallons of waste oil or up to 2.5 cubic feet of compressed air.

“We can service five Cat engines and easily haul away the waste oil with the storage we have,” East says. “We use a Kohler two-cylinder gas engine to power a Champion two-cylinder air compressor that fills a couple of the tanks dedicated to air storage. We use RAASM air-powered pumps to move fresh oil or waste oil in an out of their (respective) tanks.”

A Lincoln SA200 welder/generator rides on one edge of the bed. A large Snap-on “road chest” is

“All our guys put their sockets in the bottom drawer of the Snap-on box, all their wrenches in the second drawer, all their hand tools and other stuff in the same general locations so everybody pretty much knows where things are on the other guys’ trucks,” East says. “It saves a huge amount of time when guys are sharing a job, knowing where each other’s tools are.”

East says his role as manager — and as the chief mechanic who handles all calls at night and on weekends — is to bring organization to the sometime chaotic world of repairing broken equipment in the field.

“I actually sort of enjoy the frenzy that goes with things breaking down,” he laughs. “I like to organize the turmoil, make things go smoothly for my guys, and make things right again for our customers.”

—Dan Anderson

Dan Anderson is a part-time freelance writer and full-time heavy equipment mechanic with more than 20 years of experience working out of service trucks. He is based in Bouton, Iowa.